by Brad Thor
“One of the scientists is still alive?”
“According to Mr. Kalachka, yes. But there is only one person he will give this information to, and he wants to arrange a meeting with him in private, at which point he will ask favor face-to-face.”
The chief of staff had known the Swiss ambassador for many years and could read him like a book. “Absolutely not. I won’t allow it.”
“Allow what?” asked Friederich. “I haven’t even told you who he wants to meet with yet.”
“I know you, Hans, and I can’t believe you thought for a second I’d allow the president of the United States to meet with a man like Ozan Kalachka.”
The ambassador couldn’t help laughing. “That would indeed be a historic meeting, but thankfully, President Rutledge is not the person Mr. Kalachka wishes to meet with. He has someone else in mind.”
Anderson was trying to guess who in the U.S. government Kalachka might want a favor from and why he would need the Swiss ambassador and the president’s chief of staff to put it together for him. “As long as this person is not the president or a cabinet member, I’m willing to consider arranging a meeting. Who are we talking about?”
The ambassador leaned forward and said, “Agent Scot Harvath.”
ELEVEN
T HE W HITE H OUSE
N EXT MORNING
W hat the hell do you mean, I’m fired?” said Harvath.
“I mean, you’re fired,” replied Charles Anderson, “and I don’t care how upset you are; this is the White House, and I will not tolerate that kind of language in this building.”
Harvath was never at a loss for words, but this time he honestly didn’t know what to say. He was absolutely stunned, and on top of that, he was completely exhausted. The debriefing had started the moment he touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and the questions hadn’t stopped until a team of Secret Service agents came and whisked him away to the White House at nine o’clock this morning.
Before leaving Andrews, he had been given a few minutes to clean up. For the first time in his life, as he looked in the mirror of the men’s latrine, Harvath not only felt older than his thirty-five years, but thought he was starting to look it too. His constant workload had caught up with him. His bright blue eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with fatigue, and while the hair on his head was still light brown, traces of gray were starting to sneak into the stubble that covered his chin.
While in the SEALs, he had earned the code name Norseman, not for his rugged good looks, which were more Germanic than Norse, or because he fought like a fearsome Viking warrior, but rather because of the long string of Scandinavian flight attendants he had dated. As he splashed some cold water on his face and examined his haggard appearance, he wondered what he would look like in two or three more years if he kept going at this pace.
The one thing that didn’t seem to belie his age was his body, a testament to how hard he worked to keep himself in top physical condition. At five foot ten, and a solid one hundred seventy-five pounds, Harvath was in better shape and carried more muscle mass now than he had at twenty-five. The only effect that aging seemed to have on his body was that the pain that came with the invariable bumps and bruises of his job seemed to linger a lot longer than it used to. While an unfortunate byproduct of the way he lived his life, pain was one of the few things he felt he could exercise some semblance of control over. He had been taught time and again in the SEALs that pain was largely psychological.
What the mind can perceive, the body can achieve—and with that mantra playing on an endless loop in his mind, Harvath had forgone everything else in pursuit of his career, which now seemed to be coming to a screeching halt.
“I’m going to ask a stupid question,” said Harvath. “Does the president know I’m being dropped?”
Anderson reached into his drawer, removed a blue folder, and slid it across the desk to Harvath. “What he knows is that you’re resigning this morning.”
“So now I’m resigning?” replied Harvath as he slid the resignation letter out and read it over.
“You really screwed up in Baghdad,” continued the chief of staff. “The president didn’t like seeing you on TV.”
“Neither did I, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was a set-up.”
“I got that much from your debriefing report.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem,” replied Anderson, “is that you’ve created a firestorm with that takedown. A million and one fatwas have been issued against you, and every Muslim country on the planet wants to see you stand trial under Islamic law.”
“So?”
“So they’re not the only ones who want your head on a stake.”
“Who else does?”
“Senator Carmichael.”
“Carmichael?” scoffed Harvath. “I’m not going to have anything to do with that woman.”
“You don’t get a say in the matter.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“Scot, I warned you about your language—”
“Chuck, give me a fucking break here, would you? We’re talking about my career. If you release my name and face to the public, not only will I never work again, I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. You said it yourself—a million and one fatwas have been issued against me. Every radical Muslim on the planet will be looking to book the perfect corner table in Paradise by taking me out.”
Anderson leaned forward over his desk and looked at Harvath. “You see, that’s where you’re wrong. This isn’t about you or your career. This is about the president, and I’m not about to see him go down in flames trying to cover for you—not with the election around the corner.”
“So you’re just giving me up?” replied Harvath in disbelief.
“We’re not giving you up.”
“What the hell would you call it then? Carmichael has nothing at this point. From what I’ve heard, the Iraqis rolled up that al-Jazeera crew before they could get a shot of my face. All they’ve got is the back of my head. Seems to me that’d be pretty hard for the senator to build a case on.”
“Do you think we’d be having this conversation if all Carmichael had was the back of your head? She’s got you dead to right as the person doing the takedown.”
“How? How could she possibly have me?”
“She’s been talking to a lot of people.”
Harvath’s temper was starting to get the better of him. “People like who?”
“Like everybody. She’s on the Intelligence Committee, for Christ’s sake. She has contacts all over the community.”
“Just because she’s connected doesn’t mean she’s figured out I’m the guy in that footage.”
“She has.”
“How do you know?”
Anderson took a deep breath and tried to calm everything down. “I got a call this morning.”
“Carmichael called you?”
“No, someone else did. It was an old contact of mine—someone who’s in a position to hear things. He told me Carmichael has been asking a lot of questions about you.”
“What kind of questions?”
“She wanted to know about your time at the White House, why you left the Secret Service, and what you’ve been doing over at DHS. She even asked what the Apex Project was.”
This last revelation was too stunning for Harvath to even believe. The Apex Project was the code name for everything he did at the Department of Homeland Security. Only a handful of people even knew of its existence. Its secret budget was buried so deep and drawn from so many places it was supposed to be untraceable. How the hell had Senator Carmichael gotten her hands on it, or on any of this information? Harvath wondered. Somewhere they had a leak—a human leak who needed to be plugged, literally.
“Don’t you see what she’s trying to do?” continued Anderson. “She wants to burn the president, and she’s going to start the fire by torching you with the biggest flamethrower she can get her hands o
n.”
“Maybe she’s just trying to see what she can smoke out.”
“Come on, Scot. Face facts here. Out of all the people in this town she could possibly name, she names you? You’ve been made.”
Harvath wasn’t ready to give in so easily. “Chuck, until we’re absolutely certain, I don’t think we should—”
“We are absolutely certain,” responded the chief of staff, cutting Harvath short. “Your subpoena is going to be ready by three o’clock. She’s already made some vague statements to the press this morning that something big is coming down from the Hill. We need to put as much distance between you and the president as possible. Your desk at DHS has already been cleared out.”
“You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“We’ve got to focus on the big picture.”
“So what exactly am I supposed to do?”
“First, I’d like you to sign this letter of resignation.”
“And second?” asked Harvath, mad as hell that no one seemed to be considering what he had done for this administration.
Anderson looked at him and replied, “You might want to start thinking about a new career.”
TWELVE
G REENBELT P ARK
L ATER THAT AFTERNOON
D o you want to explain to me why we had to meet all the way out here?” demanded Harvath, whose temper had only gotten worse since his meeting with the chief of staff.
“Because right now,” replied Gary Lawlor, as he walked past his thirty-five-year-old protégé and headed for one of the park’s paved jogging trails, “you have the unfortunate distinction of being politically toxic.”
“Politically toxic,” mused Harvath as he fell in step with the man who was not only his boss, but also a long-standing friend of his family and someone who had become like a second father to him. “This isn’t exactly how I had imagined my career coming to an end, “He continued. “It’s not only a bit undistinguished, but the timing’s off by about a good twenty years. Jesus Christ, Gary, how the hell did I become the bad guy in all of this? If Carmichael goes public with my identity, that’s it. I’ve screwed the pooch. It’s all over. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“For starters, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” suggested Lawlor.
“I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for my country. You know I wasn’t exactly in this for the paycheck. I was in it because I believed in defending what America stands for.”
“And what? You’ve stopped believing? You don’t want to defend those things anymore?”
“Were you not listening when I told you Charles Anderson had me sign a letter of resignation?” asked Harvath.
Lawlor stopped and turned to face him. “What did you expect? He’s the president’s chief of staff. His job is to protect Jack Rutledge, not Scot Harvath.”
“In pursuit of which it’s okay to throw me to the wolves on the Hill?”
“If necessary, you bet,” replied Lawlor.
“But why me? Why make me the sacrificial lamb?”
“Why not you?”
“Because I do a very dangerous job for my country and I’ve never asked for anything in return.”
“Now you’ve hit upon the right word,” said Lawlor. “Dangerous. Your job is extremely dangerous. Not only for you, but for this administration as well.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Harvath asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t care if that guy in Baghdad was some jackass fruit vendor. He got paid to be a decoy. He knew he was doing something he shouldn’t, and as a result, he got the beating I was intending on handing Khalid Alomari. Maybe he’ll stick to selling fruit from now on.”
“I think you’ve guaranteed that the man’s decoy days are well behind him, but that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“Really?” inquired Harvath. “Then what is?”
“Senator Carmichael. She isn’t after you for what you got caught doing by al-Jazeera.”
“The hell she isn’t.”
“Scot, I know you’re angry, but shut up a second and listen to me. The whole al-Jazeera thing is only a pretense. Does it make us look bad in the Muslim world? Yes, it does. Can we repair that damage? Of course we can. It might take some time and a lot of PR, but we can definitely do it.
“You need to remember that Senator Carmichael didn’t get to be where she is by being stupid. She’s a savvy woman and an extremely adept politician. Would I have liked it if you had never popped up on her radar screen? Of course, but now that you’re there, she’s using lots of little crumbs of information to bake a very big cake—one which she hopes to cover with candles and use to celebrate the Democrats taking back the White House.”
“But how do we know she can even prove anything?”
“She doesn’t have to prove anything. This is Washington. All she has to do is have enough to suggest that the president may have been sanctioning off-the-books black ops, and it’ll hurt him in the election. It doesn’t matter that Jack Rutledge has been proactive as hell and has had the balls to do whatever necessary to keep this country safe, there’s a good percentage of the voting public out there who don’t like the idea of their president operating outside the scope of his power and not having to answer to anyone.”
“But that’s not how he works, and you know it,” replied Harvath.
“Of course I know, but what I say isn’t going to make a bit of difference. Carmichael is going to make him look like an egomaniacal despot waging his own war via his own private assassin. It’ll decimate the public’s trust in him.”
Harvath was silent. How could he argue? Lawlor was right.
“I don’t need to tell you what a battlefield DC is,” said the older and often wiser man, “and I also don’t need to tell you that on the battlefield, you never underestimate your opponent. The president and his chief of staff are certainly not underestimating Helen Carmichael right now.”
“You can say that again,” replied Harvath. “According to Anderson, they expect her to have a subpoena ready for me by three o’clock this afternoon.”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted us to meet here. Carmichael means to drag you out in front of the media, and the sooner the better, as far as she’s concerned. But if she can’t find you, she can’t serve you. And if she can’t serve you, then she can’t expect you to appear before her committee and the media.”
Harvath was quiet for a moment while he tried to divine his boss’s meaning. “Are you telling me you want me to duck a congressional subpoena?”
“Right now? Yes. I want you to duck it as hard as you can.”
“You know what that means,” replied Scot. “It means not going to the office, not going home—not going anywhere I normally go. What do you suggest I do?”
“Disappear.”
“For how long?” he asked
“For as long as it takes for us to fix this thing,” said Lawlor. “The last thing the president wants is for you to appear before Senator Carmichael’s committee.”
“But why did he have me sign a letter of resignation then?”
“He didn’t have you sign it, Anderson did, and it’s just a fail-safe. The president has no intention of accepting it, “He replied as he handed Harvath an envelope. “In fact, he has something else in mind for you.”
THIRTEEN
B RITISH A IRWAYS F LIGHT 216
S OMEWHERE OVER THE A TLANTIC
L ATER THAT EVENING
A s Harvath’s flight sped across the Atlantic, his mind was reeling. He doubted if anything could have prepared him for the contents of the envelope Gary Lawlor had handed him only hours earlier. The photos and description of what had happened in the village of Asalaam were horrific. In addition to the non-Muslim population, the illness had claimed five U.S. soldiers, all members of Stryker Brigade Combat Team sent to look for missing American aid workers.
Harvath ran through the images again in his mind’s eye, reliving every horrible stage of inf
ection as it unfolded. A crack containment team from USAMRIID had been dispatched to Iraq as soon as it was discovered that the SBCT soldiers had become infected. It was no use. Hours after the body strapped to the ceiling of the Provincial Ministry of Police had covered them in a fine bloody mist, they began to show symptoms of contamination. Immediately, the soldiers were placed in quarantine, which helped to prevent the illness from spreading, but despite being pumped full of antibiotics, there was nothing that could be done to save them.
The illness worked faster than anything anyone had ever seen. The only thing the USAMRIID team was able to learn was that the black sludge that exited the nasal passages right before death was actually the remains of the victim’s liquefied brain matter.
Despite their express desire to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction to use against the West, no one could understand how al-Qaeda had been able to come up with something this sophisticated. The idea that they could have bioengineered a substance to attack all but the followers of Islam was beyond comprehension. Harvath was beating himself up for not having apprehended Khalid Alomari sooner. Somehow he was involved in all of this, and Harvath couldn’t help but feel that if al-Qaeda succeeded in carrying out whatever they had planned, he would be largely at fault.
Based on everything he had learned from Lawlor, it was painfully clear that Khalid Alomari hadn’t been on a fund-raising or planning tour of the Middle East, but had been ticking names off a very special hit list. Whoever those scientists were, they had obviously been involved in engineering this mystery illness and had been taken out one by one in an effort to tie up loose ends.
While that much made sense, it still didn’t explain Ozan Kalachka’s connection to everything.
As the flight attendant removed his dinner tray, untouched, Harvath reflected on the somewhat unusual friendship he had developed with one of the East’s most elusive and fabled underworld figures.
The two had first crossed paths when Harvath had been tasked to SEAL Team Six. He had been part of a joint DEA task force charged with taking down a notorious Mediterranean drug trafficker who had branched out into the black-market arms trade. The problem, though, was that the team had been operating on faulty intelligence. After a very thorough investigation, the DEA, along with local authorities, had been able to apprehend a significant mid-level player out of Morocco. That player in turn agreed to roll over and finger his superiors in exchange for being cut loose. No one had any idea that the man’s superiors had set him up in order to have the DEA do their dirty work for them.
